Desire for experience. while there are those developers brazen enough to think their first project will change the world, personally i knew my jr. high coding skills weren't exactly enterprise level. i was more interested in playing with different platforms and exploring their limits / figuring out what works. back then i was playing with ASP (haneng & 4guysfromrolla tutorials) and PHP. ASP seemed more expensive (have to pay for a windows server) and there weren't nearly as many places i could use the code (unless i wanted to do something with a DSN or ActiveX / some other piece of windows infrastructure a kid has little incentive to learn) so eventually i stopped paying attention of ASP. now, years later, seeing what the .NET professional developers at my office fill their days with - i'm glad i didn't learn more of it, lest i'd be doing what they do. no sane person should ever be confronted with DotNetNuke.